Russia Has No Allies in Ukraine War, State TV Boss Admits

A top Kremlin propagandist acknowledged on state TV that Russia has no allies in the war launched by President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled media organization RT, made the comment during a state TV broadcast. An excerpt was posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs.

"Russian propagandist Simonyan complains that no Russian allies give Russia weapons, send soldiers or help in any other way. She remembers that Russia lost the only war it fought on its own," Gerashchenko wrote on Monday in a post alongside the video.

"Simonyan also repeats one of the most popular Russian myths that it was the USSR that won WWII. This belief is one of the pillars Russia builds its identity on."

Simonyan said Russia is waging the "most difficult... toughest and generally unprecedented war in our history," in a translation provided with the video.

"It is the most difficult and the toughest because it is the first war in our history in which we have no allies at all," Simonyan said, breaking from the Kremlin line that the war in Ukraine is a "special military operation."

The Kremlin adopted the term "special military operation" since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Since then, some have veered from that line, including Putin ally and Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, during a broadcast in November last year.

That's despite Russian citizens being convicted for referring to Putin's assault on Ukraine as a "war" or as an "invasion" under laws passed in March 2022 to crack down on dissent.

Simonyan suggested that the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is tougher for Russia than World War I or World War II, as it currently lacks allies.

"In what is commonly referred to as World War I, we also fought together. Together with Great Britain, France, the United States. And in the Second World War with such a huge number of countries, with such a powerful world first, together we were beating, beat and finished that fascist abomination," she said.

"And now they are all against us. Every single one of them. They are no longer shy to admit that this is no longer a war between Ukraine and Russia," Simonyan said.

The head of the state-run RT channel then said Russia has "one ally in this war, Belarus."

"But it's hard to call it an ally, because it is us," said Simonyan.

Simonyan said Russia has allies among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations, as "these are countries that do not condemn us."

"These are countries that expect us to win, but they don't send their citizens to the battlefield, they don't send us weapons, they don't sit around and argue about how many Leopard tanks, F-16s, HIMARS, and all the rest they would give us. They, let's call it this way, are favorably observing," she said.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry via email for comment.

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